Pictor in fabula

We must then reject as fabulous, and as a piece of national vanity, a great part of the early accounts of the progressional discovery of the art in Greece, the finding out the method of drawing the profile by tracing its shadow, the adding a colour to it in the next generation, and a number of other successional particulars by which this people would arrogate the original discovery of the whole art to themselves. No such beginnings are traceable (however plausible) among the Greeks, or even amonsgrt their before-mentioned predecessors.

The books written by the artists of antiquity (of which there were many, and by some of the best artists) are all perished[[3: (note de l\'éditeur) Pamphilus wrote on Painting and celebrated Painters; Euphranor on Symmetry ad Colours; Melanthius, Apelles, and Protogenes also wrote on Painting. Several sculptors likewise wrote upon their art; many such works are referred to by Pliny, in his comendious history of ancient art in his Natural History. Junius gives a list of theses and other works in his Pictura Veterum, p. 55 edd. Rot. 1694]] and other authors who were not so practically skilled in the art as to enable them to enter accurately into the discussion of particulars, are never satisfactory; because they are always too vague and too fond of deciding in the lump, as it enables them to conceal their want of skill in discriminating.